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Saturday, December 27, 2014

Because visual imagery will convey my sentiments better than any words my eggnog-laden brain could dare attempt, I invite you to relax and enjoy this .GIF-heavy post as we look back on the debut year of The Valentines.

Or, more specifically, the emotions we endured over the course of the last twelve months...

First there was,EXCITEMENT

OHMYGAWD! No feeling on earth could match how it felt to wake up on January 1, 2014, and realize that this year your book was going to be published.

That euphoric feeling lasted about...three seconds because FEARcame storming in the room and ruined everything!

As delicately as a brick chucked at your face, it suddenly dawned on us that all of those words we pieced together in the safety of our home offices were going to be available for the entire effing world to read. The ENTIRE. EFFING. WORLD.

...and enter the FREAK OUT.

The FREAK OUT manifested in different ways for every author. In some cases tears and foot stomping were involved, in other cases the repetitive mumbling of, "There's no f*cking way I can't do this!" could be overheard. No matter how the FREAK OUT presented, it was a scary moment that none of us ever want to encounter again. (even though we know we will--if we're lucky enough).

With the help of peer encouraging emails/chocolate/alcohol, we were somehow talked off of the ledges we were ready to leap from and able to gain a wee bit of perspective. Somebody liked this book enough to buy it, right? Maybe it's not that bad...
And so the BUSYbegan.

Hours upon hours disappeared as we tweeted, tumbled and street-teamed. We answered interview questions (the same ones, so many times) and guest-posted, we Facebooked and Rafflecoptered. We pimped our books until our fingers were bloody stumps and we'd, at some point, evolved into people we'd never seen before...

But we did it because we were debut authors and we wanted our books to be a success.

We plotted along this course until the day our ARCs arrived.

And then...HOLY CRAP!

Seeing your name on the spine of a book is one of the most thrilling sights in the world. Each one of us oozed all of that Valentine-laden thrill into the world until the day our first negative reviews showed up and brought along with it DEPRESSION and SADNESS.

The same emails/chocolate/alcohol we depended on just a few hours/days/weeks ago, were called upon once more, and we suckled from them until we were strong enough to show your faces on the Internet again, or until a glowing review came out and our grief was replaced with ENTHUSIASM! because clearly, someone recognized that our book was just as awesome as we'd always known it was.

This viscous, exhausting cycle continued, and continued, and continued, until the day each of our books were finally released. And after a fair amount of attaboys from your family and friends,

and some well-earned booty-shaking,

the only two emotions we were left with were EXHAUSTION

and complete and udder GRATITUDE.

Despite the emotional roller coaster that threatened to claim our collective sanity on more than a million one occasion, the one constant feeling has been our gratefulness for the encouragement and support offered by bloggers, readers and our fellow writers. Without you, 2014 never would have happened for us.